Yes and no. Let’s talk in terms of a few different kinds of projects.
- There have been academic family trees on the web since the Mathematics Genealogy Project was launched in 1997. Josh Dever and David Chalmers have both compiled similar advisor–student data in philosophy. There are also a handful of departmental trees out there (none in philosophy, as far as we know), and many narrative departmental histories.
- There have been lots of visualization projects for different data sets across the web. Visual Thesaurus is a great example, and many more are listed at visualcomplexity.com. Also of note is Indiana University’s Info Viz Lab.
- There are major social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that store contact information and facilitate communication—and a number of studies about them underway at major universities. Using print technologies, the American Philosophy Association and Philosophy Documentation Center have been publishing directories of philosophers and departments for decades.
- And obviously there are search indexes and sites like WorldCat, Google Scholar, and The Philosopher’s Index. Quite recently, some of these have added citation indexes as well, allowing for some estimate of a publication’s significance. Scopus has even attempted visual displays of this information.
But as far as we know, there is nothing out there like Phylo that combines aspects of all these technologies into a single research tool.
